Recent advances in mobile communication have enabled rapid popularization of smartphones. Accordingly, mobile communication network traffic, similar in characteristics to that of existing wired Internet Protocol (IP) networks, has rapidly increased. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic used in web surfing includes a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address indicating an HTTP packet destination.
Service providers demand functions that enable access permission or blocking, application of different billing plans, and the like, on the basis of URL addresses. In an A-EPC core network system supporting data rates of 100 Gbps, when search time refers to a duration used to determine whether a user-requested URL is present in a URL list stored in the core network system, a fast search algorithm with a search time measured in CPU cycles is used rather than an existing string search algorithm employing a search time measured in milliseconds or seconds.
Hash algorithms are mainly used to search for character strings without wildcard characters. A URL list maintained by a core network system may need to support wildcard characters (e.g., “*.samsung.com”) because it is difficult to individually manage numerous URL addresses.
However, hash algorithms, which are most efficient for string matching, may not be directly used to search for character strings containing a wildcard. In addition, string search algorithms capable of handling wildcards may be too slow to be usable in core networks requiring fast processing.